Opua Outbound

Serendipity
David Caukill
Sat 1 Dec 2012 22:08

Saturday  December 1st, Bay of Islands, Northland,  New Zealand  South Pacific Ocean 35 13.6S 174 08.0E  Today’s Blog by David (Time zone GMT+13.00; UTC +13.00)

 

Our supplication to “One well qualified”  Thursday before last has been well rewarded with 10 days of bright summer weather.

 

From Whangaroa, we came south to Whangamumu, a bay a few miles north of Whangaruru which itself is about 20 miles north of Whangerai.  ( “Whanga ---“ is pronounced ‘Fonga …’ so  ‘Whangaruru’ is pronounced ‘Fongarooroo’. (No – I am not making  it up.)

 

Fongamoomoo is a pleasant bay with the principal anchorage off the remains of an old whaling station.  One thing that this trip has shown  me  is the extent of mankind’s pillaging of our environment.  Whalers would set off from the UK, (and America and Japan etc.)  sail round Cape Horn and spend as long as it took to catch 100 or more, preferably sperm, whales.  The whaling stations were used as a base for provisioning but mainly to heat the blubber to extract the whale oil which was barrelled and taken back to Europe together with certain of the bones.

 

The town now known as Russell in the Bay of Islands was known as the Hellhole of the Pacific a lawless den of debauchery where dozens of whalers at a time could be anchored off while their crew when ashore for some ‘rest and relaxation’.

 

 

The Russell  water front, 200 years too late!

 

It was a hard life but the profits were enormous in 1810 a full cargo of whale oil was worth about £100,000   so that explains why there were often 3-400 whalers in the area at once. The annual whale harvest in the South Pacific alone has been variously estimated between 10-15,000 animals each year between 1805 and 1810.  It was these same vessels which took   a large proportion of the 250,000 or so giant tortoises which are estimated to have been lost from the Galapagos Islands as food for their crew - fresh meat that could be kept alive for weeks on water and a few green leaves.

 

Anyway, after Whangamumu we went back to the Bay of Islands, first to Oke Bay:

 

 

And then the following day to Deep Water Cover where we met the Dive Boat again and – while Lenie and Terry went for a tramp ashore (‘tramp’ being the NZ _expression_ for a hike),   Peter and I dived on HMNZS Canterbury, which had been scuttled there as a ‘tourist attraction’. Trouble is that it is in about 40 metres of water so even the superstructure is a deep dive for recreational divers (max practical depth is really 30 m).  Visibility was rubbish to no photos.

 

Between dives we need to wait for the nitrogen which is compressed into one’s blood to come out before diving again. It is this nitrogen – or more accurately the escape of it too quickly,  forming bubbles in one’s blood – that causes “the bends” . This can happen if you stay down too long – or come up too quickly,  as one fellow diver did when he lost control of his buoyancy, sprung to the surface like a cork , and spent the rest of the day breathing pure oxygen – as a precaution.  Fortunately, recreational diving by people like me usually is managed to avoid any serious risk of decompression sickness.

 

This time we waited between dives on the beach – but were waited on from the boat on this occasion bringing soup …. to warm the cockles so to speak!

 

 

The  second dive was again not much to write home about but as least we did get to meet Darth Vader’s distant  cousin

 

 

From there back to Opua via Pahia and last night to an OCC Party hosted by Nina Kiff, the local Port Officer.

 

Right now, we are on passage south to Tutukaka from where, tomorrow, Terry and Lenie will leave us to tour New Zealand by land. Tonight we hope for a splendid farewell dinner at Schnappa Rock (you couldn’t make up these place names!).

 

Tuesday we will be joined by Mary and Lance, Peter’s sister and brother in law, for a few days’ quiet sailing  before putting the boat to bed in Auckland next week. However, ‘quiet’ it looks like it will not be. Our supplication to “One well qualified”  having been rewarded it seems our credit has now run out  given that the weather forecast for Thursday and Friday is  in the range full house Aces on Tens through to five Jacks. 

 

May be we can find somewhere in Tutukaka  to ‘top – up’ our credit…………………..